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      Gustavo Dudamel, Superstar Maestro, Meets New York

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      On his first visit to the city since being named the New York Philharmonic’s next music director, he eagerly played the role of celebrity conductor.Gustavo Dudamel, groggy after a late-night flight from Los Angeles but still in good spirits, wandered into a roomful of New York Philharmonic employees, board members and donors on Monday afternoon and beamed.“I feel like Mickey Mouse,” he said as people approached to shake hands and pose for photos.It was Dudamel’s first visit to New York since being named the Philharmonic’s next music and artistic director — a post he will assume in 2026, after the conclusion of his tenure at the Los Angeles Philharmonic — and he was already playing the role of celebrity conductor.During his two-hour appearance at David Geffen Hall, the Philharmonic’s home, Dudamel, 42, offered few specifics about his vision, saying he needed more time to get to know the city and the orchestra. But he put on full display some of the qualities that made him the Philharmonic’s choice: charisma, charm and an ability to bring fresh excitement to classical music.He took part, with childlike giddiness, in a contract-signing ceremony. (“Are these presidential pens?” he asked as he prepared to put his name on the five-year document, which he had already signed electronically earlier this month, when the Philharmonic, in a major coup, poached him from Los Angeles.)He took questions from the Philharmonic’s leaders and the news media, weighing in on the future of classical music; his tenure at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which he has led since 2009; and his sports allegiances. (After initially declining to take sides in Mets versus Yankees, he said he was a fan of the Cardenales de Lara of Barquisimeto, Venezuela, his hometown; but also of the Los Angeles Dodgers, because of their Brooklyn heritage; and finally he declared, with an air of hesitation, “I love the Yankees, too.”)Dudamel with Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive. “I always said you would have a ticker-tape parade when you came to New York,” she said.James Estrin/The New York TimesAnd he mingled with the orchestra’s musicians, praising their sound; discussing Mahler’s Symphony No. 9, which they will perform together in May; and thanking them for the gifts they had provided while the orchestra worked to woo him. (He told the cellist Maria Kitsopoulos that her homemade cheesecake was a crucial reason he had decided to move to New York.)Christopher Martin, the orchestra’s principal trumpet, who helped lead the search for a music director, embraced him. Among the orchestra’s players, Dudamel was the favorite from the start.“This is like a dream, seeing you here,” Martin said. “Nobody can believe it.”Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, who hired Dudamel in Los Angeles in 2007, when he was 26, and spent the past year trying to lure him East, led a conversation with Dudamel on the stage of Geffen Hall before he took questions from the media.“I always said you would have a ticker-tape parade when you came to New York,” she said after cheers and whistles erupted in the hall.Dudamel said it was too early to lay out his plans for the orchestra, saying he did not want to impose his vision yet. But he reiterated his interest in creating an education program in New York similar to Youth Orchestra Los Angeles, known as YOLA, which is modeled on El Sistema, the Venezuelan social and artistic movement in which he trained.He quoted the Spanish poet and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno in describing the need to do more to connect with residents, particularly in poor neighborhoods: “The freedom of the people is in their culture.” When a reporter suggested he might call the New York version of his youth orchestra “YONY,” Dudamel smiled, saying, “I love the name.”“This is part of my DNA: to work with young people, to work with communities, to bring the orchestra to the community,” he said. “The New York Philharmonic, as the center of the artistic and musical life of this city, has to play a role, a very important role, in education.”Dudamel will be the first Hispanic leader of the Philharmonic in a city where Latinos make up about 29 percent of the population. When a reporter from Telemundo, the Spanish-language network, asked what Dudamel made of this milestone, he said he had not given it much thought. Then he said he hoped his journey from Barquisimeto to some of the world’s most prestigious stages would be an inspiration.“This can be a model so that girls, boys, young people, can have the certainty that dreams can always be achieved,” he said. “You have to work deeply, have a lot of discipline, and a lot of love for what you do, but it can be achieved.”Throughout the day, a recurring topic was Dudamel’s hair, which has been a subject of fascination since he broke onto the international scene in his early 20s.During a reception, a board member, Angela Chen, asked why he kept it shorter now, compared with his early days. “It feels more fresh this way,” he said, moving his fingers through his famous curls, which have started to gray. “One day it will be very white.”Sort of presidential: Dudamel at the ceremonial signing, with the board co-chairs, Peter May, left, and Oscar Tang. Behind him are Gary Ginstling, the orchestra’s executive director, and Deborah Borda.James Estrin/The New York TimesAt the news conference, Dudamel said he was no longer a “young promise” but that he still felt connected to the energy of his youth.“When I was 24 — 23, 24, 25 — it was crazy; I was a wild animal, not only because of my hair,” he said. “I keep that wild animal Gustavo that is always there — only with less hair.”Dudamel at moments seemed to be still processing his coming move to New York, which he has described as one of the most difficult decisions of his life.When he saw the actor and filmmaker Bradley Cooper, a friend, before the news conference, he said being in New York felt surreal.“I don’t know where to place myself right now,” he told Cooper.On his phone, he showed Cooper a photograph he had seen in Geffen Hall of Leonard Bernstein, a storied predecessor at the Philharmonic with whom he is often compared. (Cooper is directing and starring in a coming film about Bernstein.) In the photo, Bernstein is standing in an elevator after a performance with his eyes closed.“That says everything,” Dudamel said. “That exhausted look. He gave everything for music.”At the end of his visit, Borda led Dudamel on a tour of Geffen Hall, which reopened last fall after a $550 million renovation. As Dudamel looked on, she scrolled through a digital display of the Philharmonic’s past music directors — Toscanini, Mahler, Pierre Boulez, Bernstein — comparing the length of their tenures. They stopped by the new restaurant adjacent to the lobby; on the way out, Dudamel, a whisky fan, marveled at a bottle of 18-year-old Macallan.In a brief interview before leaving, Dudamel said he was exhausted but happy to finally celebrate his appointment with the orchestra, which he has conducted 26 times since making his debut in 2007.“I feel that I am blessed in life to have the opportunity to come here — to have the opportunity to extend the family that I have built in Los Angeles,” he said. “There’s a connection between all of this. It’s a big step. It’s beautiful.” More

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      SZA Makes It Nine Weeks at No. 1, and Rihanna Returns to Top 10

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      “SOS” is now the longest-running No. 1 album by a woman since Adele’s “25” seven years ago.SZA, SZA, SZA, SZA, SZA, SZA, SZA, SZA, SZA.For a ninth time, “SOS,” the latest release by the R&B singer-songwriter SZA, is No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart, making it the longest-running chart-topper by a woman in seven years — since Adele’s “25” notched 10 weeks at the top in late 2015 and early 2016.In its 10th week out, “SOS” had the equivalent of 93,000 sales in the United States, a figure that includes its 127 million clicks on streaming services, according to the tracking service Luminate. Released in early December, “SOS” has dipped from No. 1 only once, when the K-pop group Tomorrow X Together took the top spot with a blitz of sales of collectible CDs.Since “25,” a handful of other albums have had runs at No. 1 of at least nine weeks, but none were by female artists: the “Encanto” soundtrack (nine); Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” (10); and Drake’s “Views” and Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” (13 apiece).And in the time since “25,” the recorded music industry has been through a complete format transformation. When Adele released her album, she declined to make the entire thing available for streaming, and it racked up CD sales figures that seem unthinkable now — five million units sold in its first six weeks alone. (“25” was not available on streaming outlets for its first seven months.) By contrast, virtually all of the consumption of “SOS” has come via streaming; last week, only about 500 copies of the album were sold as a complete package.Also this week, Rihanna’s latest album, “Anti” (2016), rose 42 spots to No. 8 after her performance in the Super Bowl halftime show.The pop-punk-etc. band Paramore opened at No. 2 with its sixth studio album, “This Is Why,” which had the equivalent of 64,000 sales. Taylor Swift’s “Midnights” is No. 3.Wallen’s “Dangerous” is No. 4 — its 110th week on the chart and 107th in the Top 10. In the 67-year history of Billboard’s album chart, only two titles have had longer stays in the Top 10: the “My Fair Lady” Broadway cast recording, released in 1956 (173 weeks), and the soundtrack to “The Sound of Music,” from 1965 (109 weeks). In recent weeks, Wallen’s album has passed the “West Side Story” soundtrack (106) and the cast recording of “The Sound of Music” (105).Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” is No. 5 in its 41st week on the chart. More

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      Huey ‘Piano’ Smith, New Orleans Rock ’n’ Roll Cornerstone, Dies at 89

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      With songs like “Don’t You Just Know It,” “Rocking Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu” and “Sea Cruise,” he put a firm backbeat behind joyful nonsense.Huey “Piano” Smith, whose two-fisted keyboard style and rambunctious songs propelled the sound of New Orleans R&B into the pop Top 10 in the late 1950s, died on Feb. 13 at his home in Baton Rouge. He was 89.His daughter Acquelyn Donsereaux confirmed his death.Mr. Smith wrote songs that became cornerstones of New Orleans R&B and rock ’n’ roll perennials, notably “Rocking Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu,” “Don’t You Just Know It” and “Sea Cruise.”As a pianist and bandleader, Mr. Smith was known for strong left-hand bass lines, splashy right hand and forceful backbeat. He didn’t take center stage; his band, the Clowns, was fronted by a group of dancing lead vocalists, among them Bobby Marchan, who often performed wearing women’s clothes.Mr. Smith’s lyrics were full of droll wordplay and irresistible nonsense-syllable choruses. “I use slangs and things like that,” he was quoted as saying in John Wirt’s biography, “Huey ‘Piano’ Smith and the Rockin’ Pneumonia Blues” (2014), “When you put the music with words and things together, the songs just make themselves. And after you listen at it, it says something its own self, that you hadn’t planned.”Mr. Smith’s songs have been covered by Aerosmith, the Grateful Dead, Johnny Rivers, Patti LaBelle, Deep Purple and many others. But he struggled to collect royalties through more than a decade of lawsuits, and in the 1990s he filed for bankruptcy. His song “Sea Cruise” was handed over by his label to a white singer, Frankie Ford, whose voice was overdubbed atop the backing track recorded by Mr. Smith and his band.A publicity photo of Mr. Smith from early in his career. He and his group, the Clowns, had a national hit in 1957 with “Rocking Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu.”Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesHuey Pierce Smith was born on Jan. 26, 1934, in New Orleans, the son of Arthur Smith, a roofer and sugar cane cutter, and Carrie Victoria (Scott) Smith, who worked at a laundry. He taught himself to play boogie-woogie piano, strongly influenced by the New Orleans master Professor Longhair, and by his teens he was performing regularly at the Dew Drop Café, a top Black club in what was still a segregated city. He formed a duo with Eddie Lee Jones, who performed and recorded as Guitar Slim and who gave him the “Piano” moniker. He also backed Lloyd Price and other New Orleans performers onstage.Mr. Smith also became a regular session player at J&M, the recording studio owned by Cosimo Matassa, where the sound of classic New Orleans R&B was forged. His piano opens the Smiley Lewis hit “I Hear You Knocking,” and he was also heard on recordings by Earl King, Little Richard and many others.He formed the Clowns in 1957 and had a nationwide hit that year with “Rocking Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu” (later versions often rendered it as “Rockin’”), which reached No. 5 on Billboard’s rhythm-and-blues chart and No. 52 on the pop chart. A medical-minded follow-up, “Tu-Ber-Cu-Lucas and the Sinus Blues,” didn’t fare as well.With his new career as a bandleader thriving, Mr. Smith married Doretha Ford in 1957. They had five children before they divorced in the mid-1960s.Mr. Smith and the Clowns reached the pop Top 10 in 1958 with the wry “Don’t You Just Know It.” The title was a phrase often used by the band’s bus driver, Rudy Ray Moore, who would go on to a career as a bawdy comedian and the star of the “Dolemite” movies.That same year, Mr. Smith recorded “Sea Cruise.” Johnny Vincent, the owner of his label, Ace Records, was a partner in a distribution company, Record Sales Inc., with Johnny Caronna. The day after Mr. Smith recorded the music for “Sea Cruise,” planning to have the Clowns add vocals, Mr. Caronna claimed the song for a teenage singer he was managing, Frank Guzzo, professionally known as Frankie Ford.According to Mr. Wirt’s biography, Mr. Smith was told, “Johnny Vincent agreed that if you can sell a million on this record, Frankie can sell 10 million” — and, he later recalled, “It hurt me to my heart when he told me he was taking that.”Mr. Vincent, who died in 2000, also claimed co-writing credits on many songs Mr. Smith wrote and recorded for Ace, including his hits, although he later relinquished those credits. Mr. Smith moved to Imperial Records as the 1950s ended, but he returned to Ace to record a rollicking holiday album, “’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” on which he declaimed the title poem over a jaunty horn section.With the British Invasion of the 1960s, guitar-driven rock supplanted piano-centered New Orleans R&B on the pop charts. Mr. Smith continued to record on the Pitter Pat and Instant labels through the late 1960s, under his own name and others, and he had some regional hits. He also wrote and produced songs for other performers, notably Skip Easterling, who had a hit across the South in 1970 with Mr. Smith’s funk reworking of the Muddy Waters standard “Hoochie Coochie Man.”Mr. Smith married Margrette Riley in 1971. She survives him, along with his children Ms. Donsereaux, Sherilyn Smith, Huerilyn Smith, Hugh Smith, Katherine Smith, Tanisha Smith, Tyra Smith and Glenda Bold; his stepson, James L. Riley Jr.; 18 grandchildren; and 47 great-grandchildren.Barely able to make a living from his music in the early 1970s, Mr. Smith turned to other work. He started a gardening business, Smith’s Dependable Gardening Service. He also became a Jehovah’s Witness and gave up drinking and smoking.Meanwhile, the value of his old songs was increasing. In 1972, Johnny Rivers’s remake of “Rocking Pneumonia” reached No. 6 on the pop chart. Dr. John included a medley of Mr. Smith’s songs on his album “Dr. John’s Gumbo,” and Ace Records rereleased Mr. Smith’s songs on compilation albums. Mr. Smith performed occasionally as the 1970s ended. At the New Orleans club Tipitina’s and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 1979 and 1981, he reunited with singers from the Clowns’ peak years. At the 1981 festival, his musicians included the Meters’ rhythm section: George Porter on bass and Zigaboo Modeliste on drums.Mr. Smith moved to Baton Rouge in 1980 and stopped performing soon after that. His catalog continued to be heard — in cover versions, on movie soundtracks, in commercials and in reissues — but bad deals deprived him of much of his royalty income.In a series of lawsuits from 1988 to 2000, Artists Rights Enforcement Corporation — a company Mr. Smith had engaged in 1982 to help collect back royalties and then fired in 1984 — demanded and won a 50 percent share of Mr. Smith’s ongoing royalty income from four of his biggest songs, including “Rocking Pneumonia.”Mr. Smith declared bankruptcy in 1997; by then, he had pawned his piano. When full rights to the four songs were sold for $1 million to the publisher Cotillion Music in 2000, Mr. Smith remained entitled to foreign royalties but netted less than $100,000 to escape bankruptcy.The Rhythm & Blues Foundation gave Mr. Smith its $15,000 Pioneer Award in 2000, and he gave his last major performance at the foundation’s gala. He was inaugurated into the Louisiana Blues Hall of Fame in 2001.Mac Rebennack, the New Orleans pianist, guitarist and singer who recorded as Dr. John, received vital early songwriting guidance from Mr. Smith, according to Mr. Wirt’s biography. “Anyone who can talk can write a song,” he recalled being told. “So whatever you got to say, play good music and say it. You just put it where you need to say it.”Mr. Smith, Mr. Rebennack said, also advised, “If you don’t have a song that’s got some kind of simple melody people can hum, sing with and roll with, it’s like, what do you got?” More

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      Yoko Ono Fans Ring In Her 90th Birthday With a ’60s-Style Happening

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      There was singing, dancing and bell ringing in Central Park for an artist who has lived long past the days when she was often vilified.At 90, Yoko Ono has outlasted her detractors, just as she more or less predicted she would in “Yes, I’m a Witch,” a defiant song she recorded in the 1970s.“I’m not gonna die for you,” Ms. Ono sang. “You might as well face the truth / I’m gonna stick around / For quite a while / Yes, I’m a witch.”To commemorate her 90th birthday on Saturday, more than 50 artists and fans gathered at the Naumburg Bandshell in Central Park to take part in “Morning Piece for Yoko Ono,” a 1960s-style art happening that doubled as a celebration.Many of those who showed up said they had become aware of Ms. Ono decades ago, around the time when she was newly married to John Lennon and the Beatles were breaking up.“I was a big Beatles fan when I was 10, 11, 12,” said the abstract painter Jean Foos, 69, “and I heard a lot of negative stuff about her. But once I came to New York and heard her music, I loved her.”The artist Jean Foos, right, posed for a photo with a Yoko Ono banner.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesStaring at a black-and-white image of Ms. Ono printed onto a banner that hung from a wire on the bandshell stage, Ms. Foos mentioned “Season of Glass,” the album that Ms. Ono released in 1981, less than six months after Mr. Lennon was murdered.“For years in my studio, I would listen to ‘Season of Glass’ over and over,” Ms. Foos said, “especially while grieving different sad things that happened in my life. I just love her so much.”Carla Saad, a restaurateur who described herself as a “huge Beatles fan,” arrived with her 6-year-old son, Harrison Moscona. “I think Yoko is a wonderful artist,” Ms. Saad, 40, said. “She’s amazing, revolutionary, and I don’t think she’s given enough credit.”Her son, who was named after George Harrison, said, “I want to see Yoko — now!”Ms. Ono, who has not appeared in public in recent years, was not there. In 2019, at the Women’s March in Manhattan, she was photographed in a wheelchair. Two years before that, she mentioned that she was suffering from an illness, without specifying what it was. Representatives for Ms. Ono did not reply to emails seeking comment.Phillip Ward, left, and Jennifer Barton, the organizers of “Morning Piece for Yoko Ono.”Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe event on Saturday was conceived by the writer and curator Phillip Ward in the spirit of Ms. Ono’s conceptual art projects. He organized it with the public relations executive Jennifer Barton. In social media posts before the event, Mr. Ward and Ms. Barton asked participants to “say something nice about Yoko,” “bring your bells” and “make a wish.”A playlist of 39 tracks, including “Yes, I’m a Witch,” boomed out of the sound system as the celebrants gathered in the sunshine on a 32-degree morning. Around 10:30, the artist and activist Peter Cramer climbed onto the stage and grabbed the microphone, announcing, “I’ve got a song about Yoko. It’s called ‘She Thinks She’s Jackie Onassis.’”He danced and rang hand bells as he sang in a sharp falsetto voice: “Yoko! Oh, no! Oh, no! She thinks she’s Jackie Onassis!” A few people who appeared to be tourists stopped and stared at him. Moments after his brief performance, Mr. Cramer, 66, made it clear that he was a fan.“When I was a teenager,” he said, “I was in love with the Beatles — but I found that her music was much more in your face. I was getting into the whole punk scene, and it seemed a little more appropriate. It was aware of the troubles of the world in a way that appealed to my ear.”Peter Cramer, left, and Pascal Perich rang hand bells in honor of Yoko Ono.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesAt a table near the stage, celebrants wrote messages to Ms. Ono on cardboard tags and picked up white carnations and button-size hand mirrors that said “Morning Piece for Yoko Ono” on one side. After the event, Mr. Ward and Ms. Barton delivered a white bag filled with the messages to the service entrance of the Dakota, the grand apartment house overlooking Central Park that has been Ms. Ono’s main residence since 1973.In his birthday message to the artist, Pascal Perich, a 51-year-old photographer, said he wrote “We are all dancing in the stars” in French, his native language. Asked to explain what he meant by that, he said, “It was just the first thing that came to my mind.”“I just love Yoko and Yoko’s work,” Mr. Perich continued. “She’s like the hummingbird that takes the little drop of water to the giant forest fire. And the animal tells him, ‘What you are doing is for nothing.’ And the hummingbird says, ‘No, I am just doing my part.’”The writer and musician Jesse Paris Smith, who is the daughter of the singer, songwriter and author Patti Smith and her late husband, the musician Fred “Sonic” Smith, also wrote a message. “I said, ‘Yoko is a true warrior of hope, peace and love for us all,’” Ms. Smith, 35, said. “When I think of her, I think of these wonderful universal truths. It might seem corny or cheesy, but it’s so deeply needed, and she embodies all of those things.”The artist Jack Waters, 68, said that “Grapefruit,” Ms. Ono’s 1964 collection of instructional poems, was a “seminal piece for me,” despite the fact that he didn’t really understand it when he first came across it as a teenager. “I think Yoko made her biggest impression on Beatles fans, but I grew up in a family where there was a lot of art and culture, so we knew her for her artwork,” he said.A pocket mirror that reads “Morning Piece for Yoko Ono” was given to fans.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesPascal Perich wrote a note to Yoko Ono.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesMany of the poems in “Grapefruit” ask readers to imagine different scenarios. In an interview with the BBC two days before his death, Mr. Lennon acknowledged that the book had directly inspired “the lyrics and the concept” of his 1971 ballad “Imagine” and expressed the regret that he had not properly acknowledged his wife’s contribution at the time. In 2017, the credits were formally changed to list Ms. Ono as the song’s co-writer.In recent years, she has gained new fans and greater respect among critics. The shift came partly as a result of “Yes Yoko Ono,” a retrospective that had its debut in 2000 at the Japan Society in New York before it moved to other cities. In The New York Times, Michael Kimmelman wrote that the exhibition revealed Ms. Ono to be “a mischievous, wry conceptual artist with a canny sensibility” who was “way ahead of her time in giving acute visual form to women’s issues.”Another wave of appreciation came with the 2021 release of Peter Jackson’s documentary series, “The Beatles: Get Back.” In his depiction of the group’s rehearsals, recording sessions and rooftop performance in January 1969, Ms. Ono made for a riveting presence.As the author Donald Brackett details in “Yoko Ono: An Artful Life,” a biography published last year, Ms. Ono was once the target of frequent misogynist and racist attacks in British and American publications. “It was horrifying,” Mr. Brackett said in a phone interview, describing the press accounts he came across during his research.John Lennon and Yoko Ono at the 1968 launch of “You Are Here,” their joint art exhibition at the Robert Fraser Gallery in London.Mirror Syndication International/Mirrorpix, via Getty ImagesMs. Ono stayed the same over the years, unwaveringly fierce in her art and mostly mild in her public statements. Little by little, many of the skeptics came around. “She once said, ‘You change the world by being yourself,’” Mr. Brackett said. “And she has undergone an evolution, maybe even a transformation, both as a pop culture figure and as a figure in the art world.”In March 1965, when the Beatles’ jaunty “Eight Days a Week” was the No. 1 song in the United States, Ms. Ono performed “Cut Piece” at the Carnegie Recital Hall in New York. She knelt on the stage, stoic, as audience members one by one cut off her clothing with fabric shears. That performance puzzled some of those who saw it at the time but is now considered groundbreaking. In “Yoko Ono’s Art of Defiance,” an essay published last year in The New Yorker, the cultural historian Louis Menand called “Cut Piece” “a truly great work of art.”Jennifer Barton, left, and Jesse Paris Smith sang Yoko Ono songs into the microphone as part of the 90th birthday celebration.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesAs a child, Ms. Ono survived the Allied bombings of Tokyo, the city of her birth. That gave her something in common with Mr. Lennon, who was born during a lull in the Germans’ aerial attacks on Liverpool. Perhaps as a result of their common early experience, Ms. Ono and Mr. Lennon repeatedly explored the idea that the inner life is at least as important as the outside world. Mr. Lennon hit on this theme in the Beatles’ songs “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Rain” and “There’s a Place,” and Ms. Ono seems to have made it a part of her art from the very beginning.“I remember, when we were evacuated during the war, my brother was really unhappy and depressed and really hungry, because we did not have very much food,” she said in a 2013 interview. “So I said, ‘OK, let’s make a menu together. What kind of dinner would you like?’ And, he said, ‘Ice cream.’ So I said, ‘Good, let’s imagine our ice-cream dinner.’ And we did, and he started to look happy. So I realized even then that just through imagining, we can be happy. So we had our conceptual dinner, and this is maybe my first piece of art.”Ms. Ono was among a pioneering group of artists who worked out of former factories and warehouses in Lower Manhattan. While living on Chambers Street in 1961, she came up with the conceptual art piece “Painting to Hammer a Nail,” which instructs the viewer to hammer nails into a canvas.The abstract painter Martha Edelheit, 91, was part of that scene. At the celebration on Saturday, she recalled her first encounter with Ms. Ono: “I walked in when she was doing an art exhibit — I think she was hammering nails into a wall.” Ms. Edelheit, who has a solo exhibition at the Eric Firestone Gallery in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan through next month, added, “I’ve always loved what she’s done for the world as an artist.”The artists Ethan Shoshan and Martha Edelheit paid their respects to Ms. Ono on Saturday.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesJim Fouratt, a gay rights activist and nightlife impresario, said he got to know Ms. Ono because of his role in the music world. At the Central Park happening, he recalled a time in the 1980s when she attended a show by the singer-songwriter Diamanda Galás at a club he ran, Danceteria.“Diamanda was never nervous about anybody,” Mr. Fouratt, 81, said. “But that night it took her 15 minutes to get on the stage because Yoko had planted herself right there. When it was over, and Yoko went backstage, all Diamanda could do was throw her arms around her, and she started to cry. It was a beautiful moment — that kind of recognition of a strong woman doing exactly what she wanted to do. That was the sisterhood between those two women.”In his message to Ms. Ono, Mr. Fouratt wrote: “Never look back. The adventure is the future.”The artists and fans in Central Park weren’t the only ones sending best wishes to Ms. Ono. Her son, Sean Ono Lennon, had set up a website, Wish Tree for Yoko Ono, that allowed people to send their messages online. By Monday afternoon, the site had collected more than 8,400 statements from her fans.It was not clear to people at the Saturday event if Ms. Ono was at the Dakota or at another one of her residences. “I don’t know if a lot of people know what’s going on with Yoko right now,” Mr. Fouratt said.Death was the theme of the Yoko Ono exhibition “Ex It,” which was installed last year at the Bank of Lithuania in Kaunas, Lithuania. The show comprised 100 wooden coffins of different sizes. In keeping with most of the artist’s other works, “Ex It” was hopeful: Each coffin had a fruit tree growing out of it.Ms. Edelheit, in the red hat, wrote a message to Ms. Ono at a table near the bandshell.Nina Westervelt for The New York Times More

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      Christian McBride, Revered in Jazz, Is Playing the Long Game

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      At 50, the bassist is always focused on the next gig and fresh collaborations. His 18th album as a band leader is due this month.On a Friday night in late January, it was almost showtime at the Village Vanguard, but Christian McBride, the eminent jazz bassist, had not yet arrived.Earlier that evening, he had enthused about the gig — part of a week of sold-out shows with a new quintet led by the pianist Brad Mehldau — in between sips of Sandeman port and puffs of Mac Baren pipe tobacco at the Carnegie Club, a Midtown smoking lounge. “It’s starting to sound like a band,” he said.As the set time approached, he was navigating heavy Times Square traffic in his Lincoln S.U.V., air-drumming along to Bernard Purdie fills on the SiriusXM station Soul Town. Slipping into the venue just a few minutes late, he demonstrated what he’d said earlier, in his smooth rumble of a voice, about not requiring any preshow rituals: “I can show up and hit.”McBride’s assurance now seems like a given. At 50, he boasts one of the most impressive résumés of any jazz musician in his age bracket: eight Grammy wins; hundreds of recording credits alongside names such as Willie Nelson, Paul McCartney, Abbey Lincoln, Queen Latifah and his high school classmate Questlove; and prominent roles such as the host of NPR’s Jazz Night in America and the artistic director of the Newport Jazz Festival.He leads a portfolio of groups, including a brassy, hard-swinging big band, the elegant hard-bop quintet Inside Straight and the quartet New Jawn, which is heard on the freewheeling “Prime,” McBride’s 18th album as a leader, out later this month. And among fellow musicians, he’s cultivated a level of intergenerational good will that few other artists, inside or outside jazz, can claim.“Christian is among the cats who are sure about things,” the guitarist Pat Metheny, a collaborator on and off since the early 1990s, wrote in an email. “There isn’t a moment of indecision or waiting around with Christian. He’s on it and aware of everything that is happening and adjusting and allowing for the moment, but always with a vision of the tune, the changes, the time, and most importantly, the spirit of it all.”The drummer Savannah Harris works with McBride in a new, not-yet-named project that the bassist has called his Gen Z band. “There’s a few people of his generation that are key folks in that they both hold the respect of the arts institutions and hold the respect of their peers and the generations beneath them in the streets,” she said, characterizing McBride as one of those “bridge” figures. “And of the people that I’m thinking of,” she continued, “he might have the most traffic on his bridge.”Though he began garnering wide notice in the early to mid-90s, McBride stresses that his ascent was gradual. “Revisionist history says that my career started with a bang,” he said with a laugh. “No, it started with a very slow burn.”His prospects were shaky in the spring of 1990, when, on the cusp of his 18th birthday, he dropped out of the Juilliard School after two semesters, in part to pursue a gig with the vocalist Betty Carter that ended up falling through. He began working with older masters such as the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard but had to contend with the hazing that was then a rite of passage within jazz. He retains numerous stories of humiliations endured when he was first establishing himself on the scene, like the time a veteran saxophonist pop-quizzed him during a jam session, calling out chords from what turned out to be a nonexistent tune.But McBride had a sturdy inner core. Growing up in Philadelphia, he’d often been the target of bullying. “I was always getting teased about my size, my teeth — ’cause I had big teeth — ‘fat boy,’ all that kind of stuff,” he recalled in the kitchen of his Montclair, N.J., home, while Ella Fitzgerald, his 15-year-old beagle and Cavalier King Charles Spaniel mix, snored peacefully in her bed and pregame coverage of that week’s NFC Championship matchup played silently on ESPN. “But the thing that made it bearable was basically my family,” a loving, tight-knit unit centered on his mother, grandparents and uncle.“‘I’m going to be better than you,’” McBride recalled thinking of those who mocked him. “‘I’m going to work hard and I’m going to have good grades and I’m going to get out of school and do something.’ So I think there was a part of me that knew to play the long game.”Once he picked up the electric bass at age 9 — inspired by his father, Lee Smith, a bassist for acts such as the Delfonics and Mongo Santamaria, and encouraged by his great-uncle, Howard Cooper, who worked with avant-garde musicians around town — McBride began treating it as a life’s calling. Soon moving on to the upright, studying classical technique and performing in a local big band, he arrived in New York in 1989 with an unimpeachable work ethic that has never wavered.“Say what you want to,” he said at the Carnegie Club, “you can’t get me on the hours put in.”McBride’s dedication still impresses even his closest collaborators. The drummer Brian Blade has played with him since the early ’90s, notably in a quartet led by the saxophonist Joshua Redman, also including Mehldau, that has reactivated during the past few years. “I still wonder every time we play together — rather, I look in wonder as a witness to Christian’s gift working, and the care and attention which he has obviously given much time to cultivating,” Blade said. “He’s not resting on what he did yesterday; he’s still pushing forward. And in turn, it gives me that same spark and fire.”Early on, McBride was pegged as a so-called Young Lion, a diligent acolyte of time-tested, bebop-derived jazz. But while he established himself through work with esteemed elders like Hubbard, the saxophonist Joe Henderson, the drummer Roy Haynes and the pianist McCoy Tyner, he revealed the breadth of his personal pantheon on his own albums: On “A Family Affair” from 1998, he played as much funky electric bass as woody upright, nodding to an elemental James Brown obsession, while the sprawling “Live at Tonic” from 2006 found him staking out territory somewhere between the Meters, Herbie Hancock’s early-70s Mwandishi band and Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys.New Jawn is one of McBride’s most satisfying bands. Featuring Marcus Strickland on tenor saxophone and bass clarinet, Josh Evans on trumpet and Nasheet Waits on drums, it’s a quartet without a chordal instrument that convincingly encompasses elastic post-bop, dirge-like abstraction and strutting funk, sometimes uniting diverse strategies within the same piece. McBride credits Waits, best known for his role in the pianist Jason Moran’s acclaimed, long-running Bandwagon trio, with fueling the quartet’s adventurous spirit.“Sometimes we’ll be swinging really hard,” he said, “and the next thing I know, ohhh, here we go — and then we’re gone.”That love of collaboration has brought him wildly different opportunities. He spoke admiringly of a recent first performance alongside Billie Eilish at a 2022 tribute to the singer Peggy Lee. (“She knew that material like the back of her hand, so I’ve got nothing but big-time, hard-core dap for her.”) And he reflected on the “torturous” but ultimately rewarding task of reconciling the disparate approaches of the saxophonists Ornette Coleman and Sonny Rollins from behind the bass when Coleman sat in at Rollins’s 80th birthday concert in 2010.For a musician like McBride, who has seemingly played with everyone by age 50, who’s left?“I have three people left on my bucket list,” he answered without hesitation. “Gladys Knight, Dolly Parton and Mary J. Blige.”“I want to write for them,” he added. “I would want to do a big-band project with each of them.” Then he doubled back to clarify his answer, showing the combination of determination and nonchalance that’s become a trademark of his. “I mean, it kind of wouldn’t matter,” he said. “I want to just play some notes with them.” More

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      SZA’s Very Roundabout Path to Success

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicSZA’s second major label album, “SOS,” spent its first seven weeks atop the Billboard album chart, a startling feat for a performer who has at almost every turn made choices inconsistent with the demands of pop stardom.Five years have passed since her debut album, “Ctrl.” She generally makes music with a small circle and doesn’t collaborate widely. Until lately, she has largely shunned the press.But the release of “SOS” appears to mark a new chapter for the singer, who at 33 is one of the most forthright songwriters working, and who has a flexible vocal approach that’s only expanding.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about SZA’s lyricism and production choices, her deliberate and slow career path and new models of star-making in the contemporary pop marketplace.Guest:Danyel Smith, author of “Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop”Connect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      ‘Daisy Jones & the Six’ and the Ballad of Making Rock ’n’ Roll TV

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      It was the 36th day of what was supposed to be a 30-day shoot in New Orleans, but the cast and crew of the rock drama “Daisy Jones & the Six” were still at it.They were filming a scene, set in 1977, in which the actors Riley Keough and Sam Claflin, as the lead singers of the band Daisy Jones & the Six, unwind backstage after performing on “Saturday Night Live” for the first time. Half-empty liquor bottles, wood paneling, smoke-machine haze and framed photos of the Coneheads and Gilda Radner surround them.Claflin, who plays Billy Dunne, asks Keough, in the title role of Daisy Jones: “How’d it feel?”“It felt good, yeah,” she says, “I mean, not as good as cocaine.”Before New Orleans, the cast and crew had filmed for 69 days in the Los Angeles area, and afterward some of them headed to Athens and the Greek island of Hydra for a key episode. Production on “Daisy Jones & the Six” was initially scheduled to begin in April 2020, and even after it was postponed because of Covid for about 18 months, it had to be suspended a few more times. Despite daily testing protocols and mask mandates, the reality of filming concerts with hundreds of extras, hookup scenes and booze-and-Quaalude-fueled bacchanals had taken a toll.“Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll is hard to do in a pandemic,” said Lauren Neustadter, who with Reese Witherspoon executive-produced the series.“Daisy Jones & the Six” tells the story of a band’s rise to sold-out-stadium-level fame thanks to a hit album, “Aurora.” The musicians make and promote “Aurora” as Daisy, Billy and his wife, Camila Dunne (Camila Morrone), try to navigate the sharp edges of a love triangle.It’s based on a 2019 novel of the same name by Taylor Jenkins Reid that has sold more than 1 million e-book and print copies, according to NPD BookScan, and has been translated into more than 30 languages. Part of its appeal is the storytelling approach: Reid creates an oral history that reads like nonfiction, populating it with musicians and record producers who reminisce against the backdrop of beater vans, tour buses and Sunset Strip stages.“Daisy Jones & the Six” begins streaming on Amazon Prime Video on March 3.Amazon StudiosTo answer many Google searches: The Six is not a real band, though it’s inspired by Fleetwood Mac and others. Still, that uncertainty — as well as the will-they-or-won’t-they tension between Keough’s and Claflin’s characters — is something Witherspoon’s production company, Hello Sunshine, and Amazon Studios hope will grip viewers when “Daisy Jones & the Six” begins streaming its 10 episodes on Amazon Prime Video, starting March 3.For Hello Sunshine, “Daisy Jones” could affirm its book-to-screen dominance after its successes with the film “Where the Crawdads Sing” and the Netflix series “From Scratch.” For Reid, whose books have become coveted source material in Hollywood, this will be the first adaptation to reach audiences, so its popularity is likely to influence the market for her material. For the up-and-coming actors in the cast, many of whom sidelined other projects to stick with “Daisy Jones” amid its realigned shooting schedule, it’s a chance to break out.The built-in fan base that the book provides will be a boon for the series but also brings its own anxieties. “There is for me a desire to make the fans happy and bring to life this book that has lived in their hearts and in all of our hearts for so long,” Morrone said. “I don’t think I’ve ever done a project that has this many eyes on it.”It is one of the first projects that the head of Amazon Studios, Jennifer Salke, ordered after Jeff Bezos hired her in 2018. “You have to make noise,” she said, discussing her early days at the company and her reaction to the “Daisy Jones” pitch. “You have to be able to do something that is different. It can’t feel like a show that you could just get everywhere.”“Daisy Jones” promised to deliver that, she said, and Amazon stood by the production as it waited out the restrictions of the pandemic.Covid delays provided a significant benefit: more than a year for the actors to take music lessons. Before then, the most noteworthy musical credential any of them had was that Keough is Elvis Presley’s granddaughter.‘I need you to bring your iPad to the beach tomorrow’If streaming-television economics are under pressure, as layoffs at Disney, Netflix and other companies indicate, you would not know it from Amazon’s investment in “Daisy Jones & the Six.”The 1970s-era sets are designed to shag-carpeted verisimilitude. For a week, the production took over the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, using vintage pornography as a visual reference when they transformed the Viper Room into the seedy Filthy McNasty’s. The principal characters alone required 1,500 wardrobe changes in the first half of production. With other characters and extras, the production sometimes needed 250 outfits a night.About 25 original songs have been written by Blake Mills, who wrote some in collaboration with others, including Phoebe Bridgers, Marcus Mumford and Chris Weisman. Eleven of those songs make up “Aurora,” which Atlantic Records will release when the series begins streaming. The first track, “Regret Me,” dropped earlier this month and by mid-February had garnered about 2 million streams on Spotify.Even the show’s P.R. efforts hark back to the era of big-studio budgets: More than 30 publicists were involved (or hoped to be involved) in the reporting, photographing and fact-checking of this article. The photo shoot drew multiple entourages.But the TV version of “Daisy Jones” started small, with a wife and husband in Los Angeles.The husband is Scott Neustadter, a screenwriter whose credits include the 2009 movie “500 Days of Summer,” which he wrote with Michael H. Weber.From left, Scott Neustadter, Taylor Jenkins Reid and Lauren Neustadter.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesOne day in 2017, Neustadter’s representatives got a call from Brad Mendelsohn, Reid’s manager, asking if the screenwriter might want to take a look at a manuscript about a fictional 1970s rock band whose trajectory and interpersonal drama resembled Fleetwood Mac’s. Neustadter, a fan of that era’s music, started reading it that morning.He got in touch later that day with his wife, Lauren Neustadter, who had just been hired by Witherspoon to lead Hello Sunshine’s film and TV division. He reminded her that he and Witherspoon had once talked about being captivated by Stevie Nicks. “I knew this was a passion of Reese’s,” he said.Lauren spent a few hours reading Reid’s manuscript. Then she interrupted her boss’s vacation. “I need you to bring your iPad to the beach tomorrow morning,” she remembered emailing Witherspoon, “because this book is so good, and it’s going to be so competitive.”The next morning, she said, Witherspoon replied: “I’m obsessed.”‘I have prepared my whole life to write this’Days later, the Neustadters hatched a plan.Lauren took Reid to breakfast at Hugo’s, in the San Fernando Valley. As she was praising the book, her phone rang.“I think this is for you,” Neustadter said, handing it to Reid, who by then had achieved modest success as an author. She maintained her chill, at least on the outside, as she listened to Witherspoon tell her how much she loved her book.That afternoon, Scott took Reid to lunch at a coffee shop on Larchmont Avenue. “I told her I have prepared my whole life to write this,” meaning a film or TV version of “Daisy Jones,” he said.Reid decided she wanted Hello Sunshine to spearhead the screen version, with Scott and his writing partner Weber attached as creators. She ultimately sold the “Daisy Jones” manuscript to Penguin Random House.In May 2018, Lauren Neustadter and Witherspoon met Salke for lunch at Tavern, a restaurant in Brentwood. Salke, a former NBC executive, told them she was looking for big, ambitious projects that could benefit from the breadth of Amazon, including its ability to market and sell books, audiobooks, music and merchandise.“They teased me with something, but they wouldn’t tell me what it was,” Salke said. “They were like, ‘We might have something right up your alley.’”On a Friday in July, Neustadter sent her the “Daisy Jones” manuscript, a series overview and a script for the pilot episode, written by her husband and Weber, and said Salke had the weekend to consider it before Hello Sunshine would shop the series to others. Salke ordered it to series on Monday. “We just were really invested from the get-go,” she said.The following March, the novel came out and was named the pick for Witherspoon’s book club. It sailed onto the New York Times best-seller list, as did one of Reid’s earlier books, “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.” That novel’s paperback version has now spent more than 100 weeks on the list, and Netflix said last year that it is planning a screen adaptation.‘I was put on this earth to be Daisy’A few months later, the producers began to think about casting. Lauren Neustadter received a call from Alexandra Trustman, one of Hello Sunshine’s agents at C.A.A., who suggested one of her other clients, Riley Keough, for the role of Daisy.Keough had recently finished filming Janicza Bravo’s film “Zola,” in which she played a stripper, when she met in May 2019 with the Neustadters, along with Will Graham, who shared the job of being the showrunner of “Daisy Jones” with Scott Neustadter; and Mendelsohn, an executive producer of the series.“I was put on this earth to be Daisy,” Keough told them.Riley Keough, Elvis Presley’s granddaughter, plays the title character in “Daisy Jones & the Six.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesKeough declined an interview request in the weeks after the death of her mother, Lisa Marie Presley, but in an email, she said that it was the character’s combination of strength and vulnerability that moved her. “Daisy is complicated,” she wrote. “I didn’t identify with Daisy’s desire to sing and write songs, because that’s something I had never done. What I connected with was Daisy’s artistry and how she felt, not being taken seriously as a young woman.”She was one of several actors playing musicians who first came to the roles without much musical training. Suki Waterhouse, a novice pianist when she was cast, plays the keyboardist Karen Sirko. Will Harrison, who was in a band in college, plays the lead guitarist Graham Dunne. Sebastian Chacon, who had drummed a bit, plays the drummer Warren Rojas (in the book, his last name is Rhodes). Josh Whitehouse, who actually knows how to play guitar, was cast as Eddie Roundtree, the bassist.Claflin, as Billy Dunne, was the final band member cast. He had never played guitar. As part of an audition, he began to sing Elton John’s “Your Song,” before the musical supervisor urged him to stop. When Tony Berg — the veteran producer who has worked with artists including Bob Dylan, Aimee Mann and Phoebe Bridgers, and who is the show’s music consultant — asked Claflin to sing a Beatles song, the actor couldn’t think of one.“Out of everyone involved in this project, my knowledge of ’70s music, ’70s L.A., ’70s anything — especially in America and especially in the music sphere — was very, very, very lackluster,” Claflin said in an interview.The producers were determined to make it work. “We were going to lean on movie magic,” Lauren Neustadter said.After the pandemic upended the 2020 production schedule, the actors threw themselves into music. “I was incredibly into the idea of having three hours of piano lessons every single day,” Waterhouse said. “This is something that nobody gets a chance to do.”‘They sounded like a real band’The work of transforming actors pretending to be in a band into a band became the professional preoccupation of the music supervisor Frankie Pine. She oversaw a monthslong “band camp” consisting of one-on-one instruction and group rehearsal, in addition to taking and reviewing video footage of practice sessions so they could listen to their pitch and timing and watch their comportment.“I wanted to really try to create a sense that this is a real band,” Pine said. “When you’re a real band, you hang out together, you eat together, you drink together, you bitch to each other. You go through the normal motions of a group of people that are constantly together. So I was really trying to create this camaraderie that a true rock ’n’ roll band has.”“I don’t think I’ve ever done a project that has this many eyes on it,” said Morrone, bottom, with her co-stars Claflin and Keough.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesAs the production prepared to start shooting in Los Angeles in September 2021, Lauren Neustadter felt it was important for the band to put on a live concert, performing songs from the show. They rented a Hollywood studio with a stage and, still limited by Covid, invited about 40 people who were working on the series.In attendance was Tom Wright, a veteran actor (“Tales From the Hood,” “Sunshine State”) who plays Teddy Price, the Berry Gordy-Quincy Jones-esque record producer. He was prepared to be underwhelmed.As a young actor, Wright lived in New York in the 1970s and had a roommate in the music business. “I got to know and hang out with people like Ornette Coleman and Chet Baker and Jim Hall — you know, some great jazz musicians. And I got to see them perform live, so I kind of have a high bar,” he said.At the friends-and-family concert, “I was shocked,” Wright said. “They sounded like a real band. It was incredible.”If this was the band’s smallest-scale concert, the largest was in New Orleans, where the production design team refitted the 26,500-seat Tad Gormley Stadium to appear, on camera at least, as if it were Soldier Field in Chicago, where the story’s biggest concert occurs.This was the accomplishment of the show’s production designer Jessica Kender, who said that because the look of the 1970s is so recognizable, details mattered. A scene at a gas station, for example, required them to remove ethanol warnings on the pumps that wouldn’t have been there decades ago.When Nzingha Stewart, who directed four episodes, envisioned a montage in which Billy and Daisy visited dozens of radio stations, the production design crew built one radio broadcasting booth that Kender remade over and over again with decals and details summoning Tulsa, Dallas and Fort Worth. In a concert scene, merch stands are piled with band T-shirts, like one with a sepia photo of Keough that reads, “Daisy Jones and the Six: Amsterdam, the Netherlands 5 Jun 1976.”Denise Wingate, the costume designer, once traveled with the 1980s band the Bangles. When she read “Daisy Jones,” she said, “I was like, ‘I have to do it.’” During the pandemic delay, she spent hours every day searching eBay and vintage sites. Once lockdowns eased, she said, “I went to flea markets every weekend for a year.”And she fielded requests. When Keough asked for “Stevie Nicks vibes” for the Soldier Field performance, Wingate found a Halston caftan in gold lamé that she cut up the front to turn it into a cape and paired with a vintage metallic crochet dress. (“Daisy’s wardrobe was a true highlight of my life,” Keough wrote.)To find inspiration for the “Aurora” album cover, Wingate made a mood board featuring Nicks in a billowing white dress. In the cover that resulted, Billy is in a denim shirt and Daisy wears a dress similar to the one Nicks wore, which Wingate had made. Just as it is described in the book, the rock stars are staring into each other’s eyes, but a space exists between them.For Reid, who imagined this story and took it from her head to paper starting in 2016, it’s hard to believe it’s all happening. “If your book is like your baby,” she said, “then the adaptation is like my grandchild. I don’t really get to take credit, but boy am I so proud of them.”She is thrilled by the show, she said. “When I think of Daisy now, I see Riley’s face. When I think of Billy, I think of Sam.” More

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      Friedrich Cerha, 96, Who Finished Another Composer’s Masterpiece, Dies

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      His skill in completing Alban Berg’s “Lulu” almost 40 years after Berg’s death was considered one of the greatest operatic achievements of the 20th century.Friedrich Cerha, an Austrian composer and conductor who was best renowned for taking on the arduous task of completing Alban Berg’s unfinished “Lulu,” and whose skill in the effort confirmed that work as one of the greatest operatic achievements of the 20th century, died on Tuesday in Vienna. He was 96.His death was announced by his publisher, Universal Edition. It did not specify a cause.Mr. Cerha wrote several stage works, of which three — “Baal,” “Der Rattenfänger” and “Der Riese vom Steinfeld” — were produced by the Vienna State Opera. He composed orchestral, chamber and other music that found rare stylistic range within the broad confines of postwar modernism. He was a crucial figure in the rebuilding of the Viennese new-music scene, cofounding and then conducting its leading ensemble, Die Reihe. And he was a dedicated teacher to his students, who included the composer Georg Friedrich Haas.But at least outside Austria, Mr. Cerha was known less for his own work than for his celebrated contribution to another composer’s masterpiece.Berg had not quite finished orchestrating “Lulu” when he died in December 1935, although the opera, a successor to his earlier “Wozzeck,” had already become a cause célèbre for critics of Nazi cultural policies. He had set “Lulu” aside earlier that year to write his Violin Concerto and returned to it in the fall only to be struck down, partway into its third act, with an infected abscess.From its Zurich premiere in 1937 on, “Lulu” was staged in a two-act form that offered evidence of the work’s stature yet disfigured the composer’s theatrical and musical design. But by the early 1960s, scholars led by George Perle had become convinced that Berg had considered “Lulu” all but complete, and that the available materials, including a short score, made a realization both possible and necessary. Berg’s widow, Helene, banned any such thing, and his publisher, Universal Edition, publicly followed her lead. Privately, it did not.Mr. Cerha, meanwhile, had long been interested in the Second Viennese School, of which Berg was a part. Mr. Cerha had studied with former members of Arnold Schoenberg’s circle and had programmed a work by Anton Webern for the debut concert of Die Reihe, in March 1959. In June 1962, Mr. Cerha saw Karl Böhm lead “Lulu” at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna and found the two-act truncation painful to watch. The next day, he went to the offices of Universal Edition, asked for whatever documents they had and set secretly to work.A scene from Mr. Cerha’s completed edition of Berg’s “Lulu,” staged by the Paris Opera in 1979. Colette Masson/Roger-Viollet, via Granger The task was considerable. Nine hundred or so bars of one of history’s most complex scores were left to orchestrate, and although Berg’s intricate structure meant that material from the first two acts could be reused in the third, some imagination was still needed. It took Mr. Cerha until 1974 to finish it, before making further revisions after Mrs. Berg died in 1976.There was pressure, too — far more than most composers faced in their own work. “Lulu” already had a towering reputation, and its effective banning by the Nazis had kept it a political symbol after the war. When the Paris Opera finally staged Mr. Cerha’s edition, on Feb. 24, 1979, it offered “perhaps the most important and glamorous operatic premiere since the end of World War II,” Harold C. Schonberg wrote in a front-page review in The New York Times.Mr. Cerha’s contributions were so successful that he became almost a ghostwriter: He revealed “Lulu” at its full greatness, while shying away from the spotlight.His fellow composers were impressed. Pierre Boulez, who conducted the premiere, said Mr. Cerha had worked “with great care, competence and mastery.” Mr. Perle wrote that “nowhere does one have the impression that a hand other than the composer’s has had to take over.”Gyorgy Ligeti went further, saying in 1986 that Mr. Cerha, a friend, had a “total lack of vanity, which enabled him to enter wholeheartedly into the way of thinking of a congenial yet nevertheless different composer, and to sacrifice thousands of hours, and days, of his own composing.”“No one else,” Ligeti added, “could have done that.”Friedrich Paul Cerha was born in Vienna on Feb. 17, 1926, the only child of Paul and Marie (Falbigel) Cerha. His father was an electrical engineer. Friedrich learned the violin from about age 6 and had written a few compositions by the time of Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938.Like his parents, young Friedrich despised Nazism, but was conscripted first to aid the Luftwaffe in air defense and later, in 1944, into the Wehrmacht. He deserted, was caught, was sent to the front and deserted again, this time walking hundreds of miles south from Göttingen, in the middle of Germany, through the Thuringian Forest and into the mountains of Tirol, where he hid at high altitude in a hut at Lamsenjoch.The experience of fascism, and of his freedom from it, left Mr. Cerha with a lifelong reluctance to adhere to aesthetic dogmas, or even to focus solely on music; he painted, and sculpted a stone chapel in woods near his second home in Maria Langegg. After studying in Vienna at the conservatory and the university, from which he earned a doctorate in 1950, he spent three summers at Darmstadt, Germany, the hothouse of the European avant-garde, but did not lastingly embrace a single compositional school over another.“I have never fanatically advocated artistic goals,” Mr. Cerha told Universal Edition’s magazine in 2012. “I always acted from an inner conviction.”The legacy of the war is particularly audible in “Spiegel,” a frightening array of seven soundscapes for orchestra and tape that was arguably Mr. Cerha’s most important work. Dating from 1960-61, its clouds of sound resemble the far shorter, more static works that Ligeti wrote around the same time, like “Atmosphères,” and it made Mr. Cerha famous.But “Spiegel,” which he wrote without regard for practicality and did not premiere as a cycle until 1972, is also quite different, with narrative elements that add up to a terrifying hour-plus portrayal of disastrous force. In “Spiegel VI,” a maniacal march slams into nervous strings and winds, the brass braying grotesquely in the ensuing carnage; in “Spiegel V,” relentless drumrolls herald a consuming darkness — the abyss.“The pieces were invented in a purely musical way,” Mr. Cerha wrote in notes for a recording on the Kairos label. “It was only long after their completion that I understood the degree to which this work was influenced by the horrors of my war experiences and the limitless joy of freedom that I felt as a deserter in the midst of nature.”His wife, Gertraud Cerha, a musician herself, whom he married in 1951, was the keyboard soloist in the 1960 premiere of a serialist piece for harpsichord and ensemble, “Relazioni fragili.” She survives him, as do two daughters, Ruth and Irina, and two grandchildren.For some critics, the “Lulu” experience seemed to draw out a Bergian expressivity in Mr. Cerha’s style, and some of his later works — “Nacht” for orchestra, say, or his “8 Sätze nach Hölderlin-Fragmenten” for string sextet — indeed have a familiar, muted lyricism to them, though others do not. He bridled at the suggestion, however: His own works were his, alone.“That was very strange,” he told Universal Edition of this purported influence. “Before the third act of ‘Lulu’ had its world premiere, nobody ever connected me to Berg, but in the years after, this suddenly happened all the time. People detected a connection to Berg, which is of course nonsense.” More